CITSEE Research Project

CITSEE Studies

As the case of on-going transformations of sexual citizenship in post-Yugoslav space shows, globalization and EU-isation open up a space for introducing positive practices related to sexual citizenship into the local contexts. However, as this case also reveals, the improvement of citizenship policies may easily be instrumentalised by different actors involved at the national and international arenas. Thus, more attention should be paid to the ways in which LGBT rights intersect with other discourses and relations of power on the global and local levels.

In my terms, ‘perceived co-ethnics’ are defined as people who are recognised by the citizenship (or ethnizenship) conferring state as belonging to its main ethnic group although they themselves not only do not embrace that definition but have a distinct national project of their own. In other words, this imagined political community is seeking recognition in its own right under a different name and with different claims from that of the self-fashioned kin-state. However, the self-fashioned kin-state offers citizenship to them.

If feminist citizenship in SFRY has to be seen in the context of dissidence, while feminist citizenship in the context of nation-building needs to be assessed by its relationship to belonging and borders, then the post-Yugoslav feminist citizenship has to be understood in terms of political re-appropriation and re-politicization of Yugoslav socialist heritage. This re-politicization needs to be seen in the context of rigorous critique of socio-economic relations brought by neoliberal capitalism, but within the specific post-conflict and post-socialist circumstances.

This study shows how particular politics of return are often a result of negotiations among political actors within citizenship constellations – a term first used by Rainer Bauböck to denote structures in which individuals’ statuses are dependent on individuals’ being concurrently connected to several political entities. For instance, host states are interested in reducing economic burdens that displaced populations put on their shoulders and, if they are powerful enough, they can impose return to countries of origin by way of conditioning it with state recognition, financial assistance, accession to international organizations, visa free regime etc.

The weakness of all three states in the face of global economic competition has increasingly put pressure even on the revered model of citizen-soldier. In times of indebtedness and austerity, there is a greater competition for state resources and contestations of the current schemes of redistribution. The pressure to contribute economically is very much present, and the perfect citizen is no longer the soldier-citizen but the working and consuming citizen. The implications of this statement go much beyond the former Yugoslavia. In the age of corporate soldiers and wars fought by drones, there is a risk that states stop caring about the quality of their ‘stock’, adding yet another reason to shed state responsibility for their populations.

In post-Yugoslav states, intergenerational solidarity networks based on family ties have become a safety net for many citizens, and particularly for women, who are traditionally in charge of child caring and social reproduction, while at the same time being often the main breadwinners in the household. The devaluation of women’s labour and the precarity of women on the labour market in the post-Yugoslav space reinforce women’s dependency on extended family networks. While the importance of family networks in informal economic practices was common during socialism as well, in post-socialist times, however, when job security in the public sphere has largely faded, the family – as well as informal economic practices - have an even stronger significance for everyday survival.

Romani minorities in the post-Yugoslav space had uneven access to citizenship, which was specific to their socio-economic and also culturally stigmatised condition as the Subaltern, who was not able to voice its plight or it was ignored. Romani individuals who were positioned as non-citizens at their place of residence were in the most unfavourable position. However, even those minority individuals, who were able to access citizenship at their place of residence, found themselves in uneven position in comparison to other citizens. All post-Yugoslav states, also due to the dialogue with international organisations and EU integration processes, introduced legislation for minority protection, which included also Romani minorities. However, in most cases (excluding Slovenia), Romani minorities were included into the generic legal acts on minority protection, which did not recognise the fact that they are culturally stigmatised as well as have a different socioeconomic position than most other minorities.

Despite the constitutionally and legally enshrined promise of equality in Kosovo, differentiated citizenship together with a political context defined by an ethnic divide and past structural inequalities, as well as uneven external citizenship opportunities, contributed to the emergence of ‘hierarchical citizenship’, where some groups (communities), or ‘rights-and-duty-bearing units’, are ‘more equal than the others’. In other words, the formal equality of citizens and communities is contradicted by the socio-political reality where some communities are better off, thus leading to the emergence of a hierarchy of communities in Kosovo.

One of the problems of equating polities with ethno-majoritarian territories, the paper argues, is their unidimensionality. This is especially true for those polities without historical precedents or strong functional logic that would underpin the territorial boundaries. This, as some of the cases illustrate, can cause numerous problems for the viability of these polities and cement ethnicity as the only criterion defining political membership as well as rights in the long run. A few cases of multi-ethnic polities still exist but these are exceptions rather than the rule.

Although the language policies in the six states are broadly consistent with the multicultural conception of citizenship granting cultural and linguistic group rights in education, the promotion of the mutual respect principle and interethnic contact are limited, as are individual choices for the language of instruction by both majorities and minorities. The problem with homogenising groups for policy purposes – even where there is a degree of interaction between the groups – is that interactions take place between individuals who classify each other exclusively in terms of belonging to specific ethnic or cultural communities.

Overall, the visa liberalisation negotiations have had diverse effects on the citizenship regimes of South Eastern Europe. While having contributed to resolving status-related issues of the Roma and displaced persons, there has been no major breakthrough in terms of substantive advancement of anti-discrimination policies. The pressure on the governments of the Western Balkans to take measures in the direction of limiting the freedom of movement of specific groups of citizens has added a layer of discrimination on the basis of ethnic background and social status.

At the moment, based on the summarised trends of reporting on citizenship, it is obvious that the leading print media in these four countries do not offer enough space for discussion and open participation on citizenship and related topics. Print media, due to the uncertain future of the press, are strongly dependent on their political or economic patrons, and rather serve as legitimizers than informers, observers, or watchdogs. It is slightly different with the online media. Due to the penetration of Internet use in the region, and the opportunities it offers for citizens to take part in content creation and discussion, it could play a much important role in discussing the problems and issues related to the citizenship. But the impact of online media in the region of the former Yugoslavia is still uncertain and unexplored, and this could be the subject of future research.

In deciding whether to seek access to a particular citizenship most people tend to be practically minded. However, the broader sum of these individual decisions, as well as the sheer symbolic potential of using citizenship to uphold special ties between a state and a particular group, have important implications for wider political issues, such as ethnic politics, the fortunes of political parties, control of diaspora organisations, and sometimes even the high international politics in the region.

The changing citizenship regimes in Serbia illustrate the ways in which various narratives of nationhood run parallel to political changes, at times reinforcing them, at times creating obstacles for their implementation, but nevertheless providing a means by which they may be interpreted.

The citizenship regime in Slovenia can seem to have two faces. For those who focus on its numerous malfunctions, the citizenship regime seems xenophobic, even apartheid-like. By contrast, those who focus on the initial determination characterise the system as progressive and civic.

The Croatian citizenship legislation reveals the ongoing process of Croatian invention of, in the words of Rogers Brubaker, ‘the tradition of nationhood’ which is based on the idea that the Croatian state is a product of the “centennial” aspirations of the ethnic Croat community to have its own national state.

Albania’s rocky path to democracy, marked by state weakness and deep political polarisation, which ultimately led to the almost-total state collapse in 1997, prevented the country from reforming and reconstructing its legal constitutional order, including citizenship legislation.

Citizenship in the former Yugoslav and the Macedonian context is yet to have its dimensions of status, rights and equality strengthened and its dimension of membership/belonging weakened in importance.

Citizenship policies in Montenegro over last twenty years were a peculiar variant of the post-Yugoslav model, in that citizenship was not used as a mechanism of ethnic homogenisation but instead of political manoeuvring. As a result, citizenship policies in Montenegro bore many traits of the changing political environment in which they were adopted; the environment framed through the processes of state and nation building.

Citizenship has been a central issue in Kosovo’s state-building agenda, which aims to serve as a link between a war-torn community of people and a new polity based on principles of equality and all inclusiveness, and as a tool of political integration within the new political entity, which aims at replacing ethnic, religious and social divisions.

Today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina has a complex citizenship regime. It emerged as a response to instability at a particular point in the country’s history, which then became established as the dominant pattern of political interaction.